The VP Field

Charlie at Peach Pundit asks Is Newt Gingrich learning?

A candidate that mastered the use of the media against his political opponents when in the House minority was reduced do whining about liberal media after self inflicting wounds.

And that's a primarily Republican Georgia website. Which should tell you about where Newt's stock is this week. So much for the Idea Man.

Meanwhile, back on the left, Mark Mosely at The Lens scours the GOP's "Action" Man.

Jindal argued that volcano monitoring (and, implicitly, stream monitoring) should be cut from the bill because it is “wasteful spending.” He explicitly contrasted these programs with other (unnamed) programs in the bill that “make sense.” Jindal wasn’t merely mocking a potentially worthy program because it was misplaced in a stimulus bill, he was mocking it as an example of a bogus priority. Government should cut its spending, rather invest $140 million to monitor volcanoes (and floods).

Because why on Earth would Louisiana need to monitor floods? (HT: Jeffery.)

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Flood Panels (continued)

This weekend, decisions were made. In Louisiana, the US Army Corps of Engineers doesn't need to blow up levees along the Mississippi River, because there are already flood control structures in place to handle the overflow.

For the Bonne Carre spillway, this decision is easier made. Water flows from the River into Lake Pontchartrain. This might raise the level of the lake a few feet, causing some problems to those who live in low lying areas. It also affects the fisheries, as that much freshwater can change the habitats of lake and sea life very rapidly. When making the call between threatening the levees and industrial infrastructure downriver, that's not a difficult choice to make. The Bonne Carre has been open for some time now.

But those costs are minor ones compared to the opening of the Morganza. The Morganza spills Mississippi River water into the Atchafalaya River, and into communities that aren't as well-protected as Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The water is going to back up tributaries and bayous significantly (as it did on the Mississippi far upriver) and flood a lot of homes even far away from the banks of the river.

Hence the long wait to open Morganza. Not only did the USACoE have to give those people time to evacuate, or protect their property with sandbags, but it had to make a case that leaving the Mississippi River flowing at its current volume could do massive damage to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the nation's shipping and oil refining infrastructure. With a flood this big, it doesn't really matter how strong the levees are in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Those costs were weighed both ways, and the decision was made. Morganza opened this weekend. Acadiana is preparing for high water, again, and Louisiana is preparing to bear the brunt of high human costs associated with flooding.

The political implications boil my blood. Demagouges and populist sentiment won't wait long to point out that rural communities in "Real America" were sacrificed for cities and "elites" as if that makes any sort of sense in Louisiana's case. The same people would be screaming about the high price of gasoline if the refineries were allowed to flood for a month. There will - of course - be a racial undertone to it, as insidious as that is. I've already heard the phrase "President Obama Doesn't Care About White People," in reference to Kanye West's infamous response to flooding after Hurricane Katrina.

But what won't be talked about - again - is why this is happening. Why is the river flooding so badly up and down the Mississippi River? Why did decisions like this have to be made? How can our current infrastructure and zoning be made to more effectively mitigate this sort of thing? Why did most flooding come from tributaries? Why is the Louisiana coast disappearing? Why are areas so much more prone to flooding today?

Because - pay attention - this is what it looks like when the system we currently have works. This is the plan. This is our nation's cost of doing business the same way we always have. Two observations come from that:

One - if you think this cost too much, imagine if the system wasn't working as planned. I'll give you a hint, it would be 2005 flooding expensive.

Two - if you want a better flood control policy in this country, it is going to cost a lot of long term money. You have to weigh that against long-term costs.

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Flood Panels

You remember "Death Panels?" They were fake.

But Flood Panels actually do exist, and they decide whose property gets flooded and whose doesn't. And they do it all with your tax dollars.

Maybe if the people who got all riled up about the fake Death Panels came back to reality for 5 minutes and thought about our nation's very real Flood Panels, we might actually get a sane flood control policy in this country.

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Flood History

It is a shame that with almost every problem that faces the United States, our nation has already dealt with a similar problem in the past. At some point between then and now, we've either willfully forgotten the lessons or fallen prey to the snake-oil salesmen who convinces us that his medicine works the best.

Has it occurred to anyone why we have problems with flooding in this country? John Barry penned a must-read Saturday Essay in the WSJ on April 30 to describe, in layman's terms, what is going on here. (HT: YRHT)

Some of the questions Barry takes a crack at:

1. Why do all these people live in danger of flooding, and can't they just move somewhere else?

2. When did this become the Federal government's problem? What group of socialists decided that the government should be in the flood control business?

3. When did African-Americans abandon the Republican Party?

4. How do decisions made in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota end up contributing to massive property damage in Louisiana?

5. What kind of person lives in flood-prone areas and doesn't have flood insurance?

6. If the USACoE know how to build better levees, why don't they do it?

Of course, you can find more detailed answers to most of these questions by reading Barry's book, Rising Tide, but actual US history may not be compatible with an already made-up mind.

Update: Oh, here are a few ideas.

(HT: EJ)

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The Flood

Jerz and I have often spoken of government waste over the years.

Is anyone ready to start questioning why the best plan available to the Midwest and South is to blow up the levees?

I mean, if you have to destroy something and cause a catastrophe in order to escape and even bigger catastrophe, what does that tell you?

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Safe-Water Elevation

The man made strucutres that failed and flooded New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina passed the city have been the subject of much less talk than, say, the idea that "people shouldn't live in a city below sea level." Even though the city is not below sea level and people have lived here for hundreds of years, just like humans have lived in cities near rivers and coastlines for millenia.

The appropriate question is rather: "why do we appear to make the same mistakes over and over, even as recent events have demonstrated how costly those mistakes can be?"

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Some Measure of Justice

An edtorial. Includes a striking quote:

Turmoil and chaos cannot be used as excuses for breaking the law, especially not by those sworn to uphold it.

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Japan vs. New Orleans

This train is never late.

There are many comparisons and contrasts that reporters and punditry could make between the disasters in Japan and the disasters in New Orleans. A short list could include a comparison where officials ignored warnings of impending danger, you could contrast the differences in response, or you could examine the parallels of energy safety failures.

Instead of those policy failures at the hands of highly placed officials, who have so often let us down while serving as mouthpieces for well-moneyed interests let us focus on the "real" story here - why there isn't any "looting" going on in Japan.

You don't have to wonder what they're trying to say.

But if we're going to go down this road, maybe we should ask why certain Japanese citizens and local police didn't start gunning down other citizens for "looting".

Update: You knew the narrative would get busted (at least in some quarters). The news is just in - the Japanese people are just as human as the rest of us, and while they might be more "culturally resillient" in the face of many natural disasters, they still experience thieves at a fire like all other cultures.

Update 2: Yet another comparison between Japan & New Orleans and the corners cut that made local energy infrastructure unsafe. More deregulation, anyone?

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Eighteen Inches

Looks like that's the safe water level in the London Avenue Canal.

For comparison's sake, that would be water up to my knees.

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Water Word Problems

Pay attention, students, there will be a test at a later time. Or, at least, there will be news media asking "who is to blame?"

Let's see if we can get a figure that out before it shows up in your living room. Say you have a water-holding object. You have one device that puts water into the object, and one device that takes water out of the object.

If the device taking water out of the object moves slower than the devices putting water into the object, what would you expect to happen?

Exactly.

Now, what type of weather pattern might cause a great deal of need for water to be moved from one place to another in a short amount of time? What region of the nation experiences this type of weather activity?

Y'all have been paying attention, class! Good job!

Bonus question, from the Fix the Pumps post: You have one Federal entity removing water from the object, and three Local entities putting water into the object. The Federal entity tells the local entities to stop putting water into the object. How do you think the local entities will respond?

Where does the water go if the local entities cannot put it into the object designed to hold the water?

Points will be awarded based on creativity and accuracy. Discuss.

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